A Marketing Role in Product Development – Creating Buzz… & Links!

What makes your product or service different from your competitors’?  What about your product makes it better?  Most importantly, why should people buy your product over your competitors’?

These may all seem like the same question but they’re not.  Not only that, they’re questions you’d be much better off asking your competitors’ customers than your own.  Why?  Because marketing is all about attracting new customers.  If your product falls short or simply isn’t the best option, your competitors win.  If your products offer something theirs don’t, there’s value in that, and you win.  You need to find out what most often motivates the sale, be it: price, features, convenience, customer service, etc. and modify what you offer to suit.

I’m a marketer who’s all about winning.  So here are some tips to help out your marketing department, perhaps even by letting them get involved in product development.

Start simple

Lisa Barone did a great post the other day about how to listen to and watch your current customers in order to make your products work better for them.  It’s a great place to start because, let’s be honest: if you can’t keep your current customers happy, how do you expect to attract new ones?

Listening to your customer complaints & suggestions while watching, observing, and noticing how they use your products can give you insight (you may never have thought of) on how to improve the way they work.  It also shows you care about your customers.  These days customer support/relations is vital for the health of your brand, but don’t let that be the only answer you have for the three questions…because if it is, you’re more than likely missing out.

Creating Perceived Value

It’s likely that your competitors list their products’ best features in bullet points.  Whether it’s on the box, website, or some other marketing medium, they just can’t help it.   Why? Because sometimes it’s the guy with the most bullets that wins.  (If this is starting to sound like a bad western movie…we’re getting close.)

If you ask a competitor’s customer why they bought their product over yours, you’re most likely to hear something like this: “Because theirs has x and yours doesn’t.” or “Because their x is bigger/faster/better than your x.”

A lot of the time customers won’t even use the feature, but having it there gives them a sense of value over other products that don’t have it.  It may simply be a security blanket, status symbol or an excuse to brag, but that perceived value was there and it got the sale.  Beyond the sale, however, if you intend to create a buzz about your product, you’d better have something to brag about…

I can think of no product line that illustrates this better than cell phones:

Innovation – Solving Needs & Creating Wants

They say: necessity is the mother of invention.  If you truly believe that these days, however, you’re probably not in marketing – or you may not be very good at it.  In the 21^st century needs have become wants*.  In fact, the health of capitalism actually depends upon the creation of wants that are independent from our basic needs.  The real trick to marketing is blending the two: turning products into wants that feel like needs.

*I realize this is a cynical viewpoint, and really depends on how strict a definition of the word “need” vs. “want” you’re using, but there’s (at least some) truth to it.

As Lisa finished up in her recent post:

“It’s a lot easier to sell someone what they already want than trying to create a need they never had.”

While on the surface it seems like a true statement that nobody can really argue with, the problem I have with it: is that it’s not universally true.  Why?  Because: (a.) most people don’t know what they want until that something becomes available.  And (b.) It’s simply not true for certain products.  Hacks and alternate uses (that can become part of the product itself) are somewhat rare.  The example of twitter adding #hashtags because their users began widely using them is a very rare exception to this rule.

My other problem with Lisa’s quote is that it suggests an easy way out and does nothing to promote true innovation.  So I’d like to propose an alternate quote:

True innovation solves needs that most of us never knew existed.

Some of the most successful products are truly innovative because they make things faster/easier/better in a way that nobody had thought of before.

Example 1: The iPod scroll wheel – This is a feature that’s SO innovative; it’s difficult to find an MP3 player without one these days…until the iPod touch came out (of course).

Example 2: Nintendo Wii – Certainly a want more than a need, Nintendo re-invented gaming…again; and created a product with less “features” yet more buzz and demand than its competitors because of one (perhaps not so simple) technology called motion sensing.

Example 3: Knowem.com – Lisa actually used this as an example for me of a service that “solve(d) an established frustration” but for how many people (I wonder) was this a frustration for?  Certainly a wonderful service for those of us in Social Media Marketing, but not something anyone “needed”.  Rather, it’s something that makes our lives easier in a way nobody had thought of before, and now something we can’t go without.

Buzz & Links – Taking advantage of Product Development

Truly innovative products will create a buzz, attract links, and pretty much market themselves.  Word-of-mouth marketing should be the ultimate goal of any product development (for marketing) plan.  This is, of course, extremely rare and for most of us, adding features and improving products require a bit of a push in order to achieve successful buzz.  Here are my rules to make sure product development marketing goes smoothly:

Rule #1 – Nothing new = nothing gained

In order to attract real buzz for a product launch/re-launch, you either need to have something nobody else has, or do it in a way nobody else does it.  Otherwise, you’re just another product with all the bells and whistles to boot.

Rule #2 – Don’t ruin the product

Features are great, sometimes even if they don’t get used.  A problem can arise, however, if adding these features complicates the product by making it more difficult to use.  This is a BIG NO-NO and can cause more harm to your brand than buzz.

Rule #3 – Put your best foot forward

If you’re adding a number of improvements to a product, do some market research to find out which feature is most likely to make customers swoon over.  Focusing on that one feature (especially if it’s your “advantage” of your competitors) instead of the whole update is your best bet…otherwise they can sometimes drown each other out.  If they sit on an even keel, then perhaps you can take a lesson from the idon’t commercial (above).

Rule #4 – A little push is needed

Unless you’re reinventing the wheel, you’re going to want to put a good amount of marketing dollars into publicizing the improvements you’ve made as the “newness” of your features will ware old quickly.  Product updates/launches tend to have a better ROI than most re-branding campaigns and you can sometimes even get away with less expensive forms of marketing (like press releases) to start that viral domino effect.  Even my 3 examples of truly innovative products needed a push to get going.

Rule #5 – Create Buzz not Hype

Don’t try to force your product launch into a conversation.  Let the people do the talking.  Otherwise you’ll end up with more naysayers than positive buzz and/or more expectations than you can handle. (i.e. don’t over-promise and under-deliver)

Rule #6 – Raise the curtain S-L-O-W-L-Y

The products that create the most buzz seem to have information slowly “leak” out into the public.  Then ever-so-slowly: rumors turn into facts, and imagination turns into excitement and impatience.  I wouldn’t suggest faking a product “leak” by any means, but slowly giving people enough information to be interested while leaving enough to the imagination is a GREAT way to feed buzz.

Rule #7 – SEO tip – Internal Press Release

Make sure you have a page on your website or a separate site that describes (in detail) the product or updates you’ve made.  Giving people a place to link to and get accurate information will all but assure you get links and traffic back to your site if the launch creates enough buzz.  Big brands seem to get this wrong many times, although they’re rarely concerned with SEO like the rest of us

Perhaps we can help...

We’re BACK!  It’s busy-busy-busy, over here, but the web won’t wait for anyone, so let’s just get right into it, shall we?  A lot has happened since the last weekly wrap-up, so here’s the best of it:

Google’s Fast Flip – the Jury is out

Jury is out for Google’s new Fast Flip product.  Essentially Google News on crack, Fast Flip features high definition screen shots of news and magazine articles with a handy “flip” feature to scroll through the stories…the front page anyways.  Just a few clicks and you’re directed to the source of the article.  While the product is a fun way to scroll through the news, and has people calling Google an innovator…again;  many agree it’s more of a toy than a useful way to read the news.  Publishers, however, have something to rejoice about from this new product as Google is actually sharing ad revenue with the content developers.  Will it be a success?  Time will tell.  If not, Google can always continue it’s conquest of products that are.

Meanwhile over at Yahoo!…

Continuing to lose ground in the search (and other) markets, Yahoo! will launch a $100M ad campaign starting September 28th in an attempt to regain some of its share.   “It’s Y!ou” is their new slogan, and is a branding effort focused on the recent changes to Yahoo! products that are more customizable and include more comprehensive integration with the social web.  Other tag lines you can expect to see include: “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours”.

Google: No-follow or else!

Mixx.com had reportedly been slapped with a Google penalty for not using the no-follow tag on external links.  This came out after Mixx added the tag to all links including its Popular Stories page much to the objection of the community there.  They’ve since removed the use of no-follow on MOST links from the Popular Stories page, but it’s use is still present even if seemingly random and few and far between.  This isn’t the first time Google has bullied a site into using no-follows on external links (with little to no editorial control) and it probably won’t be the last…

In similar news, Twitter has added the no-follow tag to its “trending topics” links while also adding robots.txt commands to disallow the indexing of most of its subdomains – mainly m.twitter.com which currently does not include use of the no-follow tag on external links.

Seth Godin’s new product ‘Brands In Public’ isn’t well received.

Seth Godin is causing a virtual uproar in the blogosphere with his new service brands in public “the UNOFFICIAL brand discussion” site.  Since Seth announced this new product a few days ago, people have called it everything from slightly shady to brandjacking.  The website acts as a one stop shop for online brand/reputation management and features feeds from a variety of sources covering virtual buzz on a number of popular brands.  The core objection, however, is the fact that (at it’s launch) pages have been pre-populated for a number of well established brands, and are only available to be managed for a fee of $400/month.  Seth promises companies who have these pre-populated pages may opt-out (to have the page removed) for no charge, but many believe that the damage is already done.

UPDATE: Seth announced today he is taking down the pre-populated pages. (all 200 of them)

Beware the twitter worm

A social virus is on the loose and it attacks your twitter account.  The twitter worm reportedly sends you a DM from one of your tweeps with the message: “rofl this you on here:” with a link that redirects you to a “dummy” login page.  Unsuspecting users who enter their information will soon have their account hijacked so the worm can further spread itself among the Tittersphere.  You have been warned.

Unofficial Twitter app store

Via mashable: OneForty.com is a twitter app store that features about 1300 3rd party tools and services along with screenshots, reviews, and the like.  With the continued rising in Twitter’s popularity and hundreds of new 3rd party apps & tools out there, this is a place that brings it all together. If you’re thinking “why didn’t I think of it first?”  right now, you’re not the only one.

The Lighter Side of Social Media

• Ebay GOLD: A man on listed his used car on Ebay for $500, but little did he know that the 1963 LeMans Tempest (a classic car) was worth much more (even in its rusted condition).  The final bid went for over $226,000.
• This is a VERY FUNNY (however inappropriate) video (NSFW…sort of) of a well done -spoof- music video…enjoy.
• Newspaper FAIL:  the editor should have known better than to run these stories in the same issue (let alone the same PAGE).
• And for your “awwwww” cravings here is the saddest dog alive.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY!!!

“You lie.”  Say it with me; say it out loud in your home or at work in front of your computer.  Yell it with conviction. Good taste and decorum be damned.

Never before in the history of American politics has two simple words meant so much to the recognition and identification of a U.S. Congressman.  Or for that matter Senator, President or any politician.  Two simple words perfectly placed uttered in the most prestigious of forums in the most vilifying of manners.  On September 9^th 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) made his presence know the world with those two small but powerful worlds.  Up until that point, less than 1% of the American population could have told you anything about Congressman Joe Wilson.  Fast forward 1 week, and the man is practically a household name.

Look at that shit eating grin. That is the smug face of a marketing madman.

Was it staged?  Was it the brainchild of G.O.P. leader Michael Steele?  Or perhaps an idea contrived by a Conservative Washington Think Tank?  Was it a true and visceral emotional response by an outraged congressman?  Truth of the matter is that no one knows, no one cares and quite frankly no one gives a shit.  The cause is always far less important or regarded than the effect.  The only thing that matters now is that Congressman Joe Wilson has become the figurehead for the conservative party and “You Lie” has become its war cry.

What did Congressman Wilson do when he said those words?  He branded himself.  He created an instantaneous and remarkable identity that has carried throughout the mass media with the speed and veracity of a California wildfire.  There are corporations that pay $5 million dollars for a 30 SECOND ad during the Super Bowl and have far less return.  By yelling 2 simple words, Congressman Wilson became the Coca-Cola or Microsoft of the Republican party.  He’s a T-Shirt and a YouTube Video and an infomercial all wrapped into one smug son of a bitch.

In a world where Government elections are decided by Q factor, public recognition and the number of registered voters you can get to sign up for text alerts, Congressman Wilson has scored a coup.  The likes of which we have not seen for some time.  Politics aside, I have to tip my hat off to the crazy bastard.  Seriously, there are about 434 other Senators who wish that they had the forethought and testicular fortitude to think of doing the same thing.  Even the Deomcrats are wondering why in the hell they hadn’t done such an outburst when President Bush was laying out the groundwork for invading Iraq.  Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, Congressman Wilson has mad crazy skills as marketing guru. You don’t have to like him but you sure as hell have to respect him.

Sure there exists the slight possibility that there was no forethought to the matter, that he just up and yelled it because it was a gut reaction to what he thought was a con on the American public.  I’m less inclined to believe so, but even still.  Even if it was an ‘uncontrolled motor response’,  the inner workings of that mans mind ( synapses working at lightning speed, the subconscious brain producing a level of cause and effect / risk vs. reward scenarios) understood what was happening even if he himself did not.  Deep down it was known what would happen when those words flew out of his mouth through the calls of Congress and into the eyes and ears of the ravenous media craving American public.  The alternative to is that this was a well planned calculated decision.  Either way someone somewhere knew the end game to this opening salvo.  They knew what was as stake and they knew the reward.  In the end, two small words created a new Conservative Icon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, f or your viewing pleasure, I present to you the next Senator from the great state of South Carolina…. you know him, you love him…. “The Distinguished Gentleman, Mr. Wilson.”  Congrats to you sir!  Well played.